This is the kind of Hail Mary motion that should have been dispatched quickly after Trump’s lawyers filed it in February. But that’s not the Cannon way. Instead — four months later, and more than a year after Trump was indicted — she is holding a day and a half of oral argument on the issue. She will be hearing not only from Trump and prosecutors but, unusually, also from outside parties contending for and against the legitimacy of the special counsel.
Wednesday Reads
Posted: June 19, 2024 Filed under: Juneteenth | Tags: Judge Aileen Cannon, Kim Jong Un, North Korea, Russia, Special Counsel Jack Smith, stolen documents case, Vladimir Putin 4 CommentsGood Morning!!
Celebrating freedom on Juneteenth
Today is Juneteenth, so I’ll begin with some writing about the holiday that celebrates freedom from slavery.
The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board: Editorial: Juneteenth isn’t a holiday just for Black people. Everyone should celebrate freedom.
Juneteenth is no more a holiday just for Black people than the Fourth of July is a holiday just for white people. It recognizes and celebrates a profound milestone in American history — the declaration of freedom for an entire race of American people who had been held in bondage for centuries.
Although the day itself, June 19, 1865, was far less life-changing than it should have been.
Juneteenth commemorates the arrival of Union Army Major Gen. Gordon Granger in Galveston, Texas, with General Order No. 3 telling the people of the westernmost Confederate state that “all slaves are free.” Although the Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect in 1863, it couldn’t be implemented until the Civil War ended and Confederate states surrendered.
Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his troops to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in April 1865 in Virginia, but other Confederate troops further south and west continued fighting, surrendering only in the months afterward. The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery would be ratified in December 1865.
Enslaved people in Texas were the last ones in the Confederacy to find out they were freed. But the news didn’t filter across the state immediately. And some slave owners didn’t obey the order right away, waiting to see who would enforce it.
Texas may have been the last Confederate state to get word of emancipation, but in 1980 it became the first U.S. state to make it an official holiday.
Juneteenth is now a federal holiday. It’s also recognized as a state holiday in more than 25 states and the District of Columbia.
A bit more:
The 1865 announcement of freedom didn’t end systemic racism and its discriminatory effects in housing, employment and education. It didn’t stop the violence Black people faced day after day, and still do. Black people make up 13% of the U.S. population but account for 37% of the prison and jail population. Similarly, Black people are 37% of the homeless population nationwide….
But there are reasons to celebrate this holiday. Juneteenth is about honoring fortitude, perseverance and, yes, optimism. Those are traits Americans have always had. And they are traits Black Americans have demonstrated in abundance for centuries — otherwise, no Black people would have survived here. And Black communities have held celebrations big and small for Juneteenth since 1866.
Consider Opal Lee. The former teacher is often called “the grandmother of Juneteenth” for her decades of activism to get it designated a federal holiday. When she was a young girl, a mob of white supremacists attacked her Texas home and burned the furniture on Juneteeth in 1939.
In 2016, a month before she turned 90, Lee set off on a four-month walk from her hometown of Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., to publicize her cause. In 2021, Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support passed a bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday, and President Biden signed it into law.
Last month, at 97, Lee stepped across the floor at a White House ceremony to be embraced by Biden as he placed the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, around her neck.
The Guardian: As Juneteenth grows in US, southern states cling to Confederate holidays.
Juneteenth has been recognized as a US federal holiday since 2021 and acts as a day to celebrate the end of slavery in the country – but millions of Americans will not have the day off today, 19 June, to mark the occasion.
At least 30 states – including most recently Rhode Island and Kentucky – and the District of Columbia recognize Juneteenth as an official public holiday, according to the Pew Research Center.
Portrait of Opal Lee by Sedrick Huckaby
Yet as the number of states to legally declare Juneteenth a holiday rises, other states continue to cling to holidays that honor the Confederacy.
Ten states – all in the American south – have at least one day commemorating the Confederacy, according to Axios, and six former Confederate states do not officially recognize Juneteenth: Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina and North Carolina.
Mississippi and Alabama each celebrate three Confederate holidays – paid holidays for state employees: Confederate Memorial Day; the birthday of Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederacy; and Robert E Lee Day, to commemorate the leader of the Confederate army. In both states, Robert E Lee Day is also used to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr Day.
In Alabama, the Republican governor, Kay Ivey, has authorized this year’s Juneteenth as a state holiday for a fourth year, amid faltering legislative efforts to make it a permanent holiday.
A bill proposed earlier this year would have added Juneteenth as a permanent holiday in the state, but state employees would have been allowed to choose between taking that day or Jefferson Davis’s birthday off from work. The Alabama house of representatives approved the bill, but it did not get a vote in the state senate.
Read more at The Guardian.
At MSNBC, Hayes Brown has a think piece about why the Juneteenth holiday is just another sop to Black Americans instead of the government working to advance real equality: The vibes are very off this Juneteenth.
It’s Juneteenth 2022 and I am uncomfortable on a New York City beach. It’s not that the sun is too hot,which it isn’t, or that the water is too cold, though it is. The discomfort I feel comes from looking around the crowded sands and realizing how few faces look like mine on what’s meant to be a day celebrating us.
When President Joe Biden signed a bill declaring Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021, it was one of the few tangible changes that was put into place after a wave of protests for racial justice that had rocked the country the previous year. In theory, the holiday recognized a turning point in America’s history as the last slaves learned of their freedom. But as I sat on that beach, I couldn’t help but wonder: “Who is this really for?”
Juneteenth, by Kalunda Janae Hilton
Texas first made Juneteenth an official holiday in 1980. After decades as a more regional celebration, the holiday quickly gained awareness nationally over the last decade, especially after it was featured on the ABC sitcom “black-ish” in 2017. But it was the civil rights protests of 2020 that truly propelled it into the mainstream, as millions took to the streets to demand an end to police brutality against Black Americans following the death of George Floyd in Minnesota and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky. Lawmakers seized on boosting Juneteenth as a way to show that those millions of voices weren’t being totally ignored….
But it’s seeming more and more like this was a gilded token. Hopes of federal police reform were dashed when Republicans realized they could hammer Democrats for being in favor of “defunding the police.” Support for Black Lives Matter has plummeted since 2020, with only a narrow majority backing the movement compared to the two-thirds support that was once there.
And when you look at who is getting to enjoy the newly established holiday, it’s clear that the benefit is not evenly distributed. Consulting firm Mercer found that the share of private employers that made Juneteenth a paid holiday surged from 9% in 2021 to 39% in 2023.
We then must consider that roughly a quarter of Black households in America are earning less than $25,000 per year, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. That puts then in the bottom 10% of earners, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A Center for American Progress analysis of BLS data shows that among the lowest 10% of earners, 47% have no access to any form of paid time off, a number that falls to 38% when looking at part-time workers. Taken together, that means there’s a major chunk of the Black population that’s likely getting no benefit at all from Juneteenth.
Read the rest at the MSNBC link above.
Judge Aileen Cannon is back in the news, as she prepares to hear arguments on why the Trump stolen documents case should be dismissed. On of those arguments is that Special Counsel Jack Smith was illegally appointed. Yes, that’s a ridiculous notion that has already been adjudicated and rejected.
The judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case will kick off a series of hearings this week on motions to dismiss the case. One of the hearings is expected to focus on a legal theory pushed by conservative legal critics of special counsel Jack Smith that seeks to invalidate his appointment.
Judge Aileen Cannon’s court calendar related to this case has become increasingly logjammed in recent months – as she has scheduled hearings on legal maneuvers by Trump and his co-defendants that other judges would not typically entertain.
Legal experts have raised questions over whether her decisions are simply a product of inexperience or in some instances show outright favoritism towards Trump — who appointed Cannon to the bench in 2020.
Judge Cannon, for example, has set aside all of Friday for a hearing on Trump’s motion arguing that Smith’s appointment was unlawful – an issue other courts have largely rejected.
On Monday, Cannon will kick off her court schedule with another hearing related to Smith’s appointment – a motion brought by Trump challenging the funding of the special counsel’s office. The same day, Cannon will hear arguments over Smith’s request for a gag order limiting Trump’s rhetoric about law enforcement involved in the search of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022.
Next Tuesday, she is scheduled to consider Trump’s request to throw out evidence gathered during that search as well as testimony provided by Evan Corcoran, his former lead attorney who Smith has alleged Trump misled as part of his efforts to obstruct the government’s investigation.
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling at The New Republic, via Yahoo News: Judge Aileen Cannon Confusingly Does Jack Smith a Massive Favor.
Judge Aileen Cannon appears to be sick and tired of nonparties attempting to intervene in Donald Trump’s classified documents trial—even though she’s the one who allowed them to do so in the first place.
Aileen Cannon and Jack Smith
The Trump-appointed judge issued a paperless order Monday, rejecting without explanation a couple dozen Republican attorneys general and their proposed brief opposing special counsel Jack Smith’s pending gag order on the former president, which they decried as “presumptively unconstitutional.”
Attorneys general representing the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming had all signed on to the amicus curiae. In it, they argued that the tabled gag was an affront to the First Amendment rights of everyday Americans, who have a right to hear Trump push back against legal prosecutors.
The fierce opposition arose after Smith argued for a change in Trump’s bond conditions, claiming that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s Truth Social posts were “grossly misleading” and “inflammatory.” Smith argued Trump’s posts put law enforcement and potential trial witnesses in legitimate danger.
“Those statements create a grossly misleading impression about the intentions and conduct of federal law enforcement agents—falsely suggesting that they were complicit in a plot to assassinate him—and expose those agents, some of whom will be witnesses at trial, to the risk of threats, violence, and harassment,” Smith said in May.
As noted above, she will still hear arguments from outsiders, just not from a bunch of right wing attorney generals.
At The Washington Post, Ruth Marcus has and opinion piece about Judge Cannon: Judge Aileen Cannon: What will she think of next?
From the start of the investigation into Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified documents, U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon has seemed inclined to act in favor of the president who appointed her. Now, Cannon might be poised to issue her most audacious ruling yet, on Trump’s far-fetched bid to have the indictment dismissed on the grounds that special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment is constitutionally invalid.
Perhaps, in the end, Cannon won’t take the plunge and kill the case. (Such a ruling shouldn’t jeopardize the election interference case pending in Washington.) But at this point, after months of vacillating between slow-walking the case and issuing rulings favorable to Trump, Cannon can’t be underestimated.
The essence of Trump’s claim — backed by, among others, former attorneys general Edwin Meese III and Michael Mukasey — is that Smith’s naming as special counsel violates the Constitution’s appointments clause. That provision requires that “Officers of the United States” be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. But the appointments clause allows Congress to give the “Heads of Departments” — in this case the attorney general — authority to appoint “inferior officers.”
“The Appointments Clause does not permit the Attorney General to appoint, without Senate confirmation, a private citizen and like-minded political ally to wield the prosecutorial power of the United States,” they write. “As such, Jack Smith lacks the authority to prosecute this action.”
Smith “wields extraordinary power, yet effectively answers to no one,” says the brief filed on behalf of Meese and Mukasey. “He has no more authority to represent the United States in this Court than Tom Brady, Lionel Messi, or Kanye West.”
It’s true that the Supreme Court has bolstered the reach of the appointments clause in recent years. Still, the problem with the anti-Smith argument is threefold: text, history and precedent.
First, the law empowers the attorney general to make such appointments. For example, 28 U.S.C. §533 authorizes the attorney general to “appoint officials … to detect and prosecute crimes against the United States.” Likewise, 28 U.S.C. §515 provides that “any attorney specially appointed by the Attorney General under law, may, when specifically directed by the Attorney General, conduct any kind of legal proceeding, civil or criminal … which United States attorneys are authorized by law to conduct.”
And by the way, under the special-counsel regulations, Smith is bound to follow Justice Department rules and is subject to being overruled, or even removed for cause, by the attorney general.
Read the rest at the WaPo.
Yesterday, Vladimir Putin traveled to North Korea to meet with Kim Jong Un. The two dictators agreed to help each other militarily. The New York Times: Putin and Kim Sign Pact Pledging Mutual Support Against ‘Aggression.’
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, revived a Cold War-era mutual defense pledge between their nations on Wednesday, signing a new agreement that calls for them to assist each other in the event of “aggression” against either country.
The Russian president, in a briefing after the two leaders signed the document, did not clarify whether such assistance would require immediate and full-fledged military intervention in the event of an attack, as the now-defunct 1961 treaty specified. But he said that Russia “does not exclude the development of military-technical cooperation” with North Korea in accordance with the new agreement.
The pact was one of the most visible rewards Mr. Kim has extracted from Moscow in return for the dozens of ballistic missiles and over 11,000 shipping containers of munitions that Washington has said North Korea has provided in recent months to help support Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine.
It also represented the farthest the Kremlin has gone in throwing its weight behind North Korea, after years of cooperating with the United States at the United Nations in curbing Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile program — a change that accelerated after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“This is a truly breakthrough document, reflecting the desire of the two countries not to rest on their laurels, but to raise our relations to a new qualitative level,” Mr. Putin added. Neither North Korea nor Russia immediately released the text of the new agreement.
Mr. Putin denounced the United States for expanding military infrastructure in the region and holding drills with South Korea and Japan. He rejected what he called attempts to blame the deteriorating security situation on North Korea, which has carried out six nuclear test explosions since 2006 and tested intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach the United States.
“Pyongyang has the right to take reasonable measures to strengthen its own defense capability, ensure national security and protect sovereignty,” Mr. Putin said.
Mr. Kim called the pact a “most powerful agreement” and praised the “outstanding foresight” of Mr. Putin, “the dearest friend of the Korean people,” the state-owned Russian news agency RIA Novosti said.
I wonder if they also discussed ways to help put Trump back in the White House, where he would certainly withdraw the U.S. from NATO.
CNN: Putin says Russia and North Korea will help each other if attacked, taking ties to a ‘new level.’
Vladimir Putin said Russia and North Korea have ramped up ties to a “new level,” pledging to help each other if either nation is attacked in a “breakthrough” new partnership announced during the Russian president’s rare visit to the reclusive state.
Thousands of North Koreans chanting “welcome Putin” lined the city’s wide boulevards brandishing Russian and North Korean flags and bouquets of flowers, as Putin kicked off his first visit to North Korea in 24 years with a finely choreographed display of influence in the dictatorship.
The pair then signed the new strategic partnership to replace previous deals signed in 1961, 2000 and 2001, according to Russian state news agency TASS. “The comprehensive partnership agreement signed today includes, among other things, the provision of mutual assistance in the event of aggression against one of the parties to this agreement,” Putin said after the meeting.
He said the deal encompasses the “political, trade, investment, cultural spheres, and the security sphere as well,” calling the pact “truly a breakthrough document.”
Putin said joint drills involving the United States, South Korea and Japan were “hostile” toward North Korea,” characterizing the US policy as “confrontational.” Kim, meanwhile, called the new “alliance” a “watershed moment in the development of the bilateral relations.”
But the deal between the two autocrats raised many questions, too – including whether Russia’s nuclear deterrent now extends to North Korea, and vice versa, or whether the two nations will now hold joint military drills….
Putin was met with exuberant celebrations at a welcome ceremony with his counterpart at Kim Il Sung Square in the heart of the North Korean capital, where mounted soldiers, military personnel and children holding balloons cheered against the backdrop of large portraits of the each leader.
The two leaders presented their respective officials and stood together as the Russian national anthem played before riding off standing shoulder to shoulder in an open-top limousine as they smiled and waved to the crowds.
More interesting stories to check out:
BBC: China is the true power in Putin and Kim’s budding friendship.
The Washington Post: Heat wave to scorch Eastern U.S. with record high temperatures.
CNN: Why some scientists think extreme heat could be the reason people keep disappearing in Greece.
The New York Times: Trump Wasn’t Going to Stay in Milwaukee. Then Reporters Asked.
NBC News: Trump says business executives should be ‘fired for incompetence’ if they don’t support him.
The Daily Beast: Roger Stone Caught on Tape Discussing Trump’s Plan to Challenge 2024 Election.
Politico: Amy Coney Barrett may be poised to split conservatives on the Supreme Court.
Amanda Marcotte at Salon: Another evangelical abuse scandal: It’s a big reason why they worship Trump.
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: June 15, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, Cats, caturday, Donald Trump, Joe Biden | Tags: Anthony Fauci, bump stocks, disinformation, doctored video, gun violence, intersex cats, mass shootings, Supreme Court, tortoiseshell cats, Trump's dementia 4 Comments
Cinder, previously Cindi
Happy Caturday!!
I read an interesting cat news story yesterday about a “rare” male tortoiseshell kitten. From The Oregonian: ‘Unicorn’ kitten, born intersex, adopted from central Oregon shelter.
Central Oregon veterinarians are excited about a rare tortoiseshell kitten that was brought into a shelter earlier this spring, and adopted into a new family last Friday.
That’s because the kitten, Cinder, was born intersex, with both male and female genitals.
The Central Oregon Humane Society announced the news about about the kitten on Friday, saying it was like “spotting a unicorn.”
“Even though I’ve only been in the veterinary field for nine years, this very well could be a once-in-a-career moment,” Bailey Shelton, clinic manager at the shelter, said in a news release. “They always talked about how rare male tortoiseshells are back in school, but seeing one in person is something else.”
Due to a stroke of genetics, tortoiseshell colored cats, known for their swirling coats of black and orange, are almost always female. And while Cinder does have some female genitals, including what appears to be a vulva, the shelter said, it does not have a uterus or ovaries, born instead with a pair of testicles (which have since been removed).
Crystal Bloodworth, medical director for the shelter, said now that Cinder has been neutered, it will grow up appearing to be female. However, given its anatomy at birth, the shelter has opted to label the kitten as male.
“To call it a male is tough, but with the binary nature of animals and people’s perception of animals, we chose male,” Bloodworth said.
While rare, incidents of hermaphroditism in cats is not unheard of, the shelter said. Like humans, intersex cats can be born with many variations of both male and female genitalia. This cat likely has three chromosomes, XXY, with two Xs that allow for the tortoiseshell coloring and a Y that allows for the testicles.
Cinder was brought into the central Oregon shelter in April, part of a litter relinquished by a local cat owner. The kitten, presumed to be female, was taken into a foster home and named Cindi. Veterinarians discovered the male genitals during a routine spay surgery, after which the cat was renamed Cinder.
More cute photos at the link.
Here are some of the stories topping the news today.
As I’m sure you know, yesterday the corrupt Supreme Court struck down the Trump era ban on bump stocks, thus making it easier for angry men with guns to murder huge numbers of people quickly. NBC News: Supreme Court rules ban on gun bump stocks is unlawful.
In a 6-3 ruling on ideological lines, with the court’s conservatives in the majority, the court held that an almost 100-year-old law aimed at banning machine guns cannot legitimately be interpreted to include bump stocks.
The Trump administration imposed the prohibition after the Las Vegas mass shooting in 2017, in which Stephen Paddock used bump stock-equipped firearms to open fire on a country music festival, initially killing 58 people. Then-President Donald Trump personally called for the accessory to be banned.
Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said that a firearm equipped with the accessory does not meet the definition of “machinegun” under federal law.
The ruling prompted a vigorous dissent from liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
“When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck,” she wrote in reference to bump stocks enabling semiautomatic rifles to operate like machine guns. Sotomayor also took the rare step of reading a summary of her dissent in court.
Even with the federal ban out of the picture, bump stocks will still not be readily available nationwide. More than a dozen states have already banned them, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit gun-control group. Congress could also act.
A response to the decision from Mark Joseph Stern at Slate: Clarence Thomas’ Opinion Legalizing Bump Stocks Is Indefensible.
The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority carved a huge loophole into the federal prohibition against machine guns on Friday, striking down a bump stock ban first enacted in 2018 by the Trump administration. Its 6–3 decision allows civilians to convert AR-15–style rifles into automatic weapons that can fire at a rate of 400–800 rounds per minute. One might hope a ruling that stands to inflict so much carnage would, at least, be indisputably compelled by law. It is not. Far from it: To reach this result, Justice Clarence Thomas’ opinion for the court tortures statutory text beyond all recognition, defying Congress’ clear and (until now) well-established commands. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor explained in dissent, the supermajority flouts the “ordinary meaning” of the law, adopting an “artificially narrow” interpretation that will have “deadly consequences.” This Supreme Court will be squarely at fault for the next mass shooting enabled by a legal bump stock.
A Boy with a Cat, by Pierre Auguste Renoir
Friday’s decision, Garland v. Cargill, is not a Second Amendment case. The plaintiffs do not (yet) argue that the Constitution guarantees a right to own bump stocks. Rather, they claim that the Trump administration stretched existing law too far when it outlawed bump stocks following the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. The gunman committed that massacre with the assistance of a bump stock, allowing him to murder 60 people in 10 minutes from 490 yards away, the deadliest single-gunman mass shooting in U.S. history. To use this device, a gunman attaches it to his AR-15, then holds his finger on the trigger and leans forward to maintain pressure on the bump stock. A semiautomatic requires the shooter to pull the trigger to fire each round. When done correctly, by contrast, “bump firing” can then unleash a spray of bullets without repeated pulls of the trigger, and at the rate of an automatic weapon. This barrage is audible in many videos of the Las Vegas shooting; victims were mowed down in rapid succession because the bump stock enabled nonstop fire.
For years, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives had been monitoring these devices; the agency found some unlawful, depending on their precise mechanisms, but did not take a formal position overall. The Las Vegas shooting prompted ATF to conclude that bump stocks transform semiautomatic rifles into machine guns, rendering them illegal under a long-standing federal statute. That’s because this law bans “any part designed and intended solely and exclusively” for “converting a weapon into a machinegun.” And a “machinegun” is defined as any firearm that fires “automatically” by “a single function of the trigger.” After extensive deliberation, ATF found that bump stock–equipped rifles do exactly that.
Now the Supreme Court has decided that it understands firearms better than the ATF. Thomas’ majority opinion reads like the fevered work of a gun fetishist, complete with diagrams and even a GIF. The justice, who worships at the altar of the firearm, plainly relished the opportunity to depict the inner workings of these cherished tools of slaughter. (It’s no surprise that he borrowed the images from the avidly pro-gun Firearms Policy Foundation.) To reach his preferred result, Thomas falsely accused ATF of taking the “position” that bump stocks were legal, then “abruptly” reversing course after the Las Vegas shooting. This account is dead wrong: ATF took a careful, case-by-case view of different bump stock–like devices as gunmakers developed them, deeming some permissible and others unlawful. The gun industry pushed these devices into the mainstream by deceiving ATF about their purpose; in one case, for instance, a manufacturer won approval from the agency by claiming a bump stock was designed to accommodate people with limited hand strength—then turned around and marketed it as the next best thing to a machine gun.
Read the rest at Slate.
The Supreme Court still has a large number of cases to decide before they wrap up this session. One of those decisions will be on Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from anything he did as “president.” Adam Liptak at The New York Times: Supreme Court’s Leisurely Pace Will Produce Pileup of Late June Rulings.
The Supreme Court has been moving at a sluggish pace in issuing decisions this term, entering the second half of June with more than 20 left to go. That is not terribly different from the last two terms, when the pace at which the court issued decisions started to slow….
There are two main theories for why the court has started moving slowly, and they reinforce each other. The first is that the proportion of blockbusters is high, in this term in particular. In the coming weeks, the justices will weigh in on criminal charges against former President Donald J. Trump, abortion, guns, social media, homelessness, the opioid crisis and the power of executive agencies.
Morning Kiss, by Raphael Vavasseur
Of the 23 remaining cases, perhaps a dozen of them have the potential to reshape significant parts of American society.
The second theory is that the justices are not getting along very well in the aftermath of the leak of the decision overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, the decision itself, the drumbeat of ethics scandals, the announcement of an ethics code that seems toothless and the drop in public respect for the court.
The justices themselves, whose party line has long been that they are a collegial bunch, have let slip a darker view in public appearances.
Soon after the leak, Justice Clarence Thomas said it was “like kind of an infidelity.”
“Look where we are, where that trust or that belief is gone forever,” he said. “And when you lose that trust, especially in the institution that I’m in, it changes the institution fundamentally. You begin to look over your shoulder.”
In her own remarks last month, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the court’s direction has reduced her to tears.
“There are days that I’ve come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried,” she said. “There have been those days. And there are likely to be more.”
On Friday, Justice Sotomayor announced a dissent in a case on a firearms law from the bench, a rare move that signals profound disagreement.
The court has said that it will not issue more decisions until Thursday. It will doubtless add days for decision announcements the last week of June, the court’s self-imposed deadline for finishing its work before the justices’ summer break. But it will be a challenge to issue all of the remaining decisions by then.
Maybe Thomas and Alito are getting too old to keep up? That’s another important reason why Biden just has to win in November. If Trump is elected, those two will step down and be replaced by even worse people, if that is possible.
Speaking of old people, Donald Trump turned 78 yesterday. Yes, President Biden is a few years older, but he kept up an amazing pace during his two recent trips to Europe. In fact, the Biden-Harris campaign Twitter account noted that in a speech in Palm Beach yesterday, “Trump attack[ed] President Biden for being too energetic: He flies back and forth and back and forth between countries.” Meanwhile, Trump has been playing golf more than campaigning.
Meanwhile, Trump met with a group of CEO’s on Thursday, and it did not go well for him. Christina Wilke and Brian Schwartz at CNBC:
Former President Donald Trump failed to impress everyone in a room full of top CEOs Thursday at the Business Roundtable’s quarterly meeting, multiple attendees told CNBC.
“Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said one CEO who was in the room, according to a person who heard the executive speaking. The CEO also said Trump did not explain how he planned to accomplish any of his policy proposals, that person said.
A girl with her cat, by Emile Vernon
Several CEOs “said that [Trump] was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought [and] was all over the map,” CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin reported Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Among the topics on which Trump offered scant details were how he would reduce taxes and cut back on business regulations, according to two other people in the room who spoke to CNBC….
The same CEOs who were struck by Trump’s lack of focus “walked into the meeting being Trump supporter-ish or thinking that they might be leaning that direction,” Sorkin reported.
“These were people who I think might have been actually predisposed to [Trump but] actually walked out of the room less predisposed” to him, Sorkin said….
Trump’s energy in the meeting was also noticeably subdued, according to two people who were in the room. At no time during his remarks was there any noticeable applause for Trump, two attendees told CNBC.
It’s difficult to understand why anyone is surprised by Trump’s idiocy at this point. I guess they must only watch Fox News and read the Wall Street Journal.
This week, the New York Post doctored a video to make President Biden look spaced out like Trump often is. William Vaillancourt at The Daily Beast: White House Rips ‘Desperate’ Murdoch Press Over Deceptive Biden Video.
A member of the White House communications team went after The New York Post on Thursday after it posted on social media a deceptively edited video of President Joe Biden at the G7 economic summit in Italy.
White House Senior Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates responded to a post by the publication on X that had the caption, “President Biden appeared to wander off at the G7 summit in Italy, with officials needing to pull him back to focus.”
“The Murdoch outlets are so desperate to distract from @POTUS’s record that they just lie,” Bates wrote….
The fake video showed Biden walking away from the other people to talk to some skydivers who had just landed nearby. The Post cut out the skydivers and show Biden appear to be walking away for no reason.
“Here, they use an artificially narrow frame to hide from viewers that he just saw a skydiving demonstration,” Bates continued. “He’s saying congratulations to one of the divers and giving a thumbs up.”
Bates included a wider version of the same clip which shows Biden walking over toward one of the skydivers, who could not be seen in the Post’s video.
The Post isn’t the only Murdoch-owned paper that the White House’s press team has criticized lately. In taking issue with a report in The Wall Street Journal claiming that Biden’s mental acuity was “slipping,” Bates called attention to how some Democrats in Congress said their quotes to the contrary were cut from the article.
A girl with a cat, by Pierre Bonnard
Disinformation is very serious problem in the presidential campaign, particularly because of Trump’s stochastic terrorism and his followers’ responses. Check out this story by Joseph Menn at The Washington Post: Stanford’s top disinformation research group collapses under pressure.
One more story, before I wrap this post up. Anthony Fauci has a tell-all book coming out, and Martin Pengally writes about it at The Daily Beast: Anthony Fauci: Volcanic Donald Trump Screamed F-Bombs, Then Said He Loved Me.
Donald Trump shouted foul-mouthed abuse at Anthony Fauci, then lurched into telling him he loved him—and claimed he would win the 2020 election in a “fucking landslide,” the top medical adviser reveals in his new memoir.
In the eagerly awaited book, Fauci describes conversations with Trump during the COVID-19 pandemic in which the then-president would “announce that he loved me and then scream at me on the phone.”
By Edouard Vuillard
“Let’s just say, I found this to be out of the ordinary,” Fauci writes, of conversations peppered with f-bombs, including the claim Fauci had cost the U.S. economy “one trillion fucking dollars.”
The book, On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, will be published in the U.S. next week—as Trump and President Joe Biden’s rematch gathers pace. The Daily Beast obtained a copy.
On the page, Fauci describes interactions with Trump as the administration wrestled with the president’s opposition to public health measures including masking; Trump’s desire to reopen the country; his indulgence of advisers with dubious qualifications pushing untested treatments; his bizarre suggestion that bleach might kill the virus; and, ultimately, his own hospitalization with COVID….
In 2020, within weeks of the first COVID cases, Fauci became a Republican punching bag. Enemies saw him as an avatar of the medical establishment when he relentlessly urged COVID precautions, starting with social distancing, moving to lockdowns, then masking and vaccines.
He told Congress this month that he, his wife, and his adult daughter were the subjects of death threats. During the pandemic he received a full-scale security detail.
In his book, Fauci reports his last conversation with Trump, in which Trump said he would win re-election “by a fucking landslide” against Biden, whom he deemed “fucking stupid.”
Those are my offerings for today. I hope you find something of interest to you here.
Wednesday Reads
Posted: June 12, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, abortion rights, birth control, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, War on Women | Tags: Department of Justice, Hunter Biden, Merrick Garland, Project 2025, Reproductive Health Care, Ryan Hamilton, Texas 7 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
There are lots of important stories today; it’s difficult to decide which of them is most important, so I’ll just begin with another reproductive health care horror story out of Texas. I don’t know if you’ve been following this one, but a few days ago, a man from Texas posted on Twitter about what happened to his wife when she sought help for a failing pregnancy. He expressed so poignantly what so many couples have been dealing with after the Supreme Court overturned Roe.
Here is a portion of his first post about it. Read the whole thing at the link.
My heart is broken: As friends & family know, my wife was pregnant with our 2nd child, & about to begin her 2nd trimester. A few days ago she had severe pains, & bleeding, and had to go to the emergency room. There, it was discovered that our baby no longer had a heartbeat. Devastated doesn’t come close to what that feels like. Unfortunately for people like us, because of the current laws in the state of Texas, that was only the beginning of this nightmare. Jess (my wife) had an “incomplete miscarriage”, and what needed to happen, what was best for HER, and her health, was to terminate the pregnancy, and get the baby out.
Radio DJ Ryan Hamilton
The doctor gave her a medication that would move this process along, and sent her home. Where, apparently we would be handling it ourselves. We were told it might take a couple of attempts before it worked….
After a long, painful night of the equivalent of early labor, the baby was still with her. So, we went back to the Emergency Center to get the 2nd dose. A new doctor was on call. He was an older man. You could hear him in the hallway as he said, “I’m not giving her a pill so she can go home and have an ab*rtion!”. Being well aware that our baby no longer had a heartbeat. Then, he came into the room to say, and I quote: “Considering the current stance. I’m not going to prescribe you this pill”. Then, just sent us on our way.
The “CURRENT STANCE”?! Did he really just say that?! No one should ever have to hear their wife say: “Get this dead baby out of me!”.
Can you even imagine how that must feel?
The pain, and the bleeding continued. So, we decided to go to another hospital, about an hour away. There was a female doctor on call there, and we thought we might have better luck.
I should probably mention, the procedure to get the baby out is called a D & C. It’s scary, & traumatizing, but sometimes necessary in situations like ours. Especially in emergency circumstances.
So we get to the next hospital. They take Jess in, ask her a bunch of questions, do a new scan… confirm that the baby is still there, with no heartbeat, and then disappear… for hours. Only to come back in and keep asking the same questions over and over. It’s becoming clear that they’re primary concern is NOT my wife’s health. Instead, they seem to be worried about the legalities involved.
So, they decide it is not “enough of an emergency” to perform the D & C. They do, however, prescribe another, stronger, final dose of the medication for us to try again… at home.
So, we go home to try again. Another long day/night of early labor pains. Only to discover my wife UNCONSCIOUS in the bathroom. Having to pick my wife’s cold, limp body off of that bathroom floor, not sure if I was about to lose her, is something I will NEVER forget. She had to be rushed to the hospital.
By this point she had lost so much blood, and bodily fluid, her body gave out. They were able to stabilize her, give her the fluids she needed, and we came back home yesterday afternoon. We were also able to confirm that our baby was no longer with her.
Now, not only do we have to live with the loss of our baby… we have to live with the nightmare of what we just experienced because of political and religious beliefs. MY WIFE’S HEALTH SHOULD HAVE COME FIRST. PERIOD! God knows what mental and emotional damage this has done. If you consider yourself a staunch “pro-lifer” … 1) You’ve never been through what we just went through, and 2) You should take a long, hard look in the mirror and reevaluate your reasons for supporting such a cold, barbaric, ignorant point of view. It’s not that black & white, and it’s never going to be. If you think your “Pray To End Ab*rtion” sign in your yard is “Christian”, I suggest you revisit the teachings of Jesus and try again. If you support these laws that make ab*rtion illegal, and result in people being put through what we just were, you should be ashamed of yourself. I’ve never been so angry, or heartbroken… and the devastation I’m feeling must pale in comparison to what my poor wife is feeling.
If you go to Hamilton’s feed, you can read much more. Now here is a portion of his latest post from yesterday:
How is my wife? Lots of folks asking (thank you)….It’s been a little over 2 weeks since it happened, & we were told it would be a minimum of 6 weeks before her body recovered from all the blood she lost.
Ryan and Jess Hamilton
Because of the amount of blood loss, she still gets light headed & has dizzy spells. But those are getting less frequent. We are monitoring her HCG levels at home. As of now, she is still getting a positive pregnancy test. This is where it gets scary. If those levels don’t go down soon there is serious risk of infection, which can lead to a world of other very scary problems. Including sepsis. So, she’s not out of the woods yet, physically… and her incomplete miscarriage, is STILL potentially incomplete.
The likelihood of her still needing a D&C is looking increasingly likely. Which, if they would have just DONE THE PROCEDURE IN THE FIRST PLACE, WE WOULDN’T BE HERE! The barbaric way she was treated will forever infuriate me. We have no faith in the doctors, or the medical system here in Texas….So seeking care here is not something we are interested in. However, there are physicians in other states who have reached out. They have been caring, & kind, & very generous in their offers to get us the help we need, if we need it.
This is real life here in Texas. Denying my wife the care she needed. Sending her home on 3 different occasions to almost bleed out on our bathroom floor. Texas Abortion Law did that. My wife is strong. I am in awe of her strength as she recovers. I know she’s going to be ok. But, here we are, weeks later, and we STILL may have to leave the state to get the care she needs….
How many women in Texas and other red states have experienced these nightmarish results since the end of Roe? We know there are many. As we all know, women are once again second class citizens or worse. Right wing Republicans are calling stories like this “fear-mongering.” One anti-abortion site actually claimed that he is lying.
They say the same things about Republicans’ efforts to ban birth control. Anyone who votes for Republican this year is supporting their war on women.
Yesterday’s news was dominated by another family tragedy, the felony conviction of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Republicans seem almost disappointed in the outcome of the trial; they apparently hoped that President Biden would interfere to protect his son.
From Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: Hunter Biden’s conviction destroys key MAGA conspiracy theory.
Yesterday, Hunter Biden, son of the president, was convicted on three charges of lying about narcotics use on a gun-purchase form.
In a sane world, this would not be great news for former president and presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, who has been arguing for a year that President Joe Biden has subverted and weaponized the Justice Department. Are we to believe that Biden weaponized the the DOJ to prosecute his own son?
Apparently we are. Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt popped up gamely on Newsmax to insist that the Hunter conviction is just a “distraction from the real crimes of the corrupt Biden family crime family.” (RNC co-chair Lara Trump used the same talking point on Hannity as this newsletter was being finalized.) Trump advisor and right-hand ghoul Stephen Miller similarly tried to keep the conspiracies spinning; he insisted that the DOJ should have prosecuted Hunter not on gun charges, but for more serious crimes.
The hapless James Comer also got in on the act, tweeting that Hunter’s conviction is somehow evidence that the DOJ “continue[s] to cover for the Big Guy, Joe Biden.”
Of course, if Hunter had been exonerated, Comer and company would be insisting the verdict was rigged. You can’t shame conspiracy theorists. But for anyone who’s not inside the MAGA bubble, the verdict shows pretty clearly that Biden is doing anything but weaponizing the rule of law — even if the law in this case is neither thoughtful nor just.
What result did Republicans want? According to Berlansky:
Meanwhile, Donald Trump has been convicted in New York on 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Trump is slated to be sentenced next month. He’s also facing a slew of other charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his mishandling of classified material after he left the White House.
Hunter Biden leaves court after conviction, holding hands with Jill Biden and his wife Melissa Cohen Biden
Republicans have worked themselves into a rabid lather in defense of Trump’s rampant criminality. Shortly after Republicans took control of the House last year, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan created a Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government specifically to push false claims that Biden’s DOJ is engaged in political prosecutions of conservative figures, especially Trump.
Trump recently made the ludicrous claim that the DOJ is trying to kill him. Ultra MAGA Rep. Matt Gaetz floated another conspiracy theory in a hearing this month, charging Attorney General Merrick Garland with “dispatching” a former senior official at DOJ to work in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and push through a Trump conviction. This claim is, of course, baseless.
In this climate, a Hunter Biden exoneration would be red meat. The right was already gearing up to spew gleeful conspiracy theories and blame the president if Hunter was not convicted. Just last week, Fox News host Jesse Watters pushed a racist conspiracy theory in which he claimed the trial had been stacked with Black jurors who would refuse to vote to convict.
With Hunter’s conviction, though, MAGA is facing the sad demise of their conspiratorial hopes. Gaetz, for instance, tweeted, “The Hunter Biden gun conviction is kinda dumb tbh.” But if Hunter had beaten the charges, you can bet everyone from Gaetz to Miller to Trump to Jordan to rabid MAGA twitter blue checks would all be on the same message. And it wouldn’t be that the charges are underwhelming.
Instead of attacking the judge, jury, and prosecution in his son’s case, President Biden made a graceful public statement:
“As I said last week, I am the President, but I am also a Dad,” Biden said. “Jill and I love our son, and we are so proud of the man he is today. So many families who have had loved ones battle addiction understand the feeling of pride seeing someone you love come out the other side and be so strong and resilient in recovery.”
“As I also said last week, I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal,” the president added. “Jill and I will always be there for Hunter and the rest of our family with our love and support. Nothing will ever change that.”
Biden also changed his plans for the afternoon to head home to Delaware to be with his son.
Jill Lawrence at The Bulwark: Joe Biden Won’t Give Up on Hunter or America. Who is the real tough guy in this race? It’s not Donald Trump.
WE GET IT, AMERICA. You think Donald Trump is tough and Joe Biden is compassionate, and therefore not tough enough. But you’ve got it exactly backwards. Trump whines so constantly about “what I’ve been through” that he should adopt “Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me” as his campaign song.
Don’t mistake Biden’s empathy for weakness. The major challenges he has confronted in his first term have required focus, discipline, and strength—from the death, destruction, and global destabilization of two raging wars to his own son’s prosecution on gun charges and the jury’s guilty verdict Tuesday.
Persistence, restraint, forcefulness, forbearance—these qualities speak to an underlying toughness, and Biden has demonstrated them all during his presidency. The Hunter Biden saga is no exception.
Here’s what I mean:
When he took office, Joe Biden retained Delaware’s Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, David Weiss, to finish an investigation into whether Hunter Biden falsified a gun form and evaded taxes while he was addicted to drugs. Joe Biden did not attack the justice system when a Trump-appointed judge—Maryellen Noreika—questioned Hunter’s plea agreement, which ultimately fell apart. Joe Biden didn’t comment or intervene when Attorney General Merrick Garland—his own appointee—elevated Weiss to special counsel status, allowing him broader authority to investigate and bring charges.
President Biden hugging Hunter after his conviction. The President traveled to Delaware to be with his son.
When his son went on trial in Wilmington, again in Noreika’s courtroom, Joe Biden did not attack the judge. He also said he would not pardon Hunter if he were convicted. After the guilty verdict Tuesday, the president said he was proud of “the man he is today” and added: “As I also said last week, I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal.”
Although prosecutions in gun cases like Hunter’s are rare, as even some conservatives have noted, Biden did not call the system “rigged.” He did not howl about the unfairness of it all. And he left it to others to make a point that should be obvious: Trump’s convictions last month are not the same as Hunter’s. As filmmaker/TV producer Morgan J. Freeman joked shortly after the verdict, “How will this affect Hunter Biden’s campaign?” Exactly.
Patti Davis, a president’s daughter and a self-described former speed and cocaine addict, wrote this week that Hunter’s actions and illness forced Joe Biden “into a choice between the primal urge to protect a child and the public responsibility to uphold the law. That is a terrible place to be.”
BIDEN WAS STRONG ENOUGH AND TOUGH ENOUGH to choose upholding the law. He was also tough enough to keep a speaking engagement with gun-safety advocates, many of whom have experienced personal tragedy involving guns, a few hours after his son was convicted on all three gun charges. And he was tough enough to weather what happened at that event.
“Never give up on hope,” Biden told the audience at the conference hosted by the group Everytown for Gun Safety. Then a protester began shouting at him about “genocide,” upset about deaths in Gaza amid Israel’s fierce response to last fall’s Hamas attack. The Biden-friendly crowd erupted into chants of “four more years,” drowning out the heckler. Biden’s response was remarkable: “No, no, no, no,” he said. “Folks, folks, it’s okay. Look, they care. Innocent children have been lost. They make a point.”
Read the rest at the Bulwark link.
Republicans repeatedly accuse President Biden and Democrats of “weaponizing” the DOJ and the justice system, but Donald Trump has made clear that he is the one who hopes to do that in another term as “president.”
Yesterday, Attorney General Merrick Garland responded to those accusations in The Washington Post: Merrick Garland: Unfounded attacks on the Justice Department must end.
Last week, a California man was convicted of threatening to bomb an FBI field office where hundreds of agents and other employees work. In one of his threats to the FBI, the man wrote: “I can go on a mass murder spree. In fact, it would be very explainable by your actions.”
These heinous threats of violence have become routine in an environment in which the Justice Department is under attack like never before.
In recent weeks, we have seen an escalation of attacks that go far beyond public scrutiny, criticism, and legitimate and necessary oversight of our work. They are baseless, personal and dangerous.
These attacks come in the form of threats to defund particular department investigations, most recently the special counsel’s prosecution of the former president.
Merrick Garland
They come in the form of conspiracy theories crafted and spread for the purpose of undermining public trust in the judicial process itself. Those include false claims that a case brought by a local district attorney and resolved by a jury verdict in a state trial was somehow controlled by the Justice Department.
They come in the form of dangerous falsehoods about the FBI’s law enforcement operations that increase the risks faced by our agents.
They come in the form of efforts to bully and intimidate our career public servants by repeatedly and publicly singling them out.
They come in the form of false claims that the department is politicizing its work to somehow influence the outcome of an election. Such claims are often made by those who are themselves attempting to politicize the department’s work to influence the outcome of an election.
And media reports indicate there is an ongoing effort to ramp up these attacks against the Justice Department, its work and its employees.
We will not be intimidated by these attacks. But it is absurd and dangerous that public servants, many of whom risk their lives every day, are being threatened for simply doing their jobs and adhering to the principles that have long guided the Justice Department’s work.
Read the rest at the WaPo.
Finally, here’s a powerful piece at Slate by Dahlia Lithwick and Norman Ornstein: The Biggest Lie Trump–Biden 2024 Rematch Voters Are Telling Themselves. The system will not inevitably “hold.”
Most would-be dictators run for office downplaying or sugarcoating their intentions, trying to lure voters with a vanilla appeal. But once elected, the autocratic elements take over, either immediately or gradually: The destruction of free elections, undermining the press, co-opting the judiciary, turning the military into instruments of the dictatorship, installing puppets in the bureaucracy, making sure the legislature reinforces rather than challenges lawless or unconstitutional actions, using violence and threats of violence to cow critics and adversaries, rewarding allies with government contracts, and ensuring that the dictator and family can secrete billions from government resources and bribes. This was the game plan for Putin, Sisi, Orbán, and many others. It’s hardly unfamiliar.
Donald Trump is rather different in one respect. He has not softened his spoken intentions to get elected. While Trump is a congenital liar—witness his recent claim that he, not Joe Biden, got $35 insulin for diabetics—when it comes to how he would act if elected again to the presidency, he has been brutally honest, as have his closest advisers and campaign allies. His presidency would feature retribution against his enemies, weaponizing and politicizing the Justice Department to arrest and detain them whether there were valid charges or not. He has pledged to pardon the Jan. 6 violent insurrectionist rioters, who could constitute a personal vigilante army for President Donald Trump, presumably alongside the official one.
Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, home of Project 2025
He has openly said he would be a dictator on Day One, reimplementing a Muslim ban, purging the bureaucracy of professional civil servants and replacing them with loyalists, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash protests and take on opponents while replacing military leaders who would resist turning the military into a presidential militia with pliant generals. He would begin immediately to put the 12 million undocumented people in America into detention camps before moving to deport them all. His Republican convention policy director, Russell Vought, has laid out many of these plans as have his closest advisers, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Michael Flynn, among others. Free elections would be a thing of the past, with more radical partisan judges turning a blind eye to attempts to protect elections and voting rights. He has openly flirted with the idea that he would ignore the 22nd Amendment and stay beyond his term of office.
The battle plan of his allies in the Heritage Foundation, working closely with his campaign via Project 2025, includes many of the aims above, and more; it would also tighten the screws on abortion after Dobbs, move against contraception, reinstate criminal sanctions against gay sex while overturning the right to same-sex marriage, among other things. His top foreign policy adviser, Richard Grenell, has reiterated what Trump has said about his isolationist-in-the-extreme foreign policy—jettison NATO, abandon support for Ukraine and give Putin a green light to go after Poland and other NATO countries, and reorient American alliances to create one of strongmen dictators including Kim Jong-un. Shockingly, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson violated sacred norms and endangered security by bypassing qualified lawmakers and appointing to the House Intelligence Committee two dangerous and manifestly unqualified members—one insurrectionist sympathizer, Rep. Scott Perry, who has sued the FBI, and one extremist demoted by the military for drunkenness, pill pushing, and other offenses, Rep. Ronny Jackson—simply because Donald Trump demanded it. They will have access to America’s most critical secrets and will likely share them with Trump if his status as a convicted felon denies him access to top secret information during the campaign. This is part of a broader pattern in which GOP lawmakers do what Trump wants, no matter how extreme or reckless.
In general, the mainstream media have shrugged at these overt plans and troubling actions, and most voters either have not focused on them or have dismissed them as exaggerations or impossibilities. After all, our constitutional system has endured for almost 250 years, and the web of checks and balances is strong. There is evidence to support that optimism. We have just seen a historic moment in the rule of law: A unanimous jury of his peers found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying financial documents to influence the outcome of the 2016 election….
But conviction notwithstanding, there is reason to be alarmed—deeply alarmed. This one felony conviction was hardly a vindication of the American justice system. The system “held” only insofar as it was capable of somewhat muzzling the ongoing threats leveled by the defendant against the presiding judge and his family, the jurors and the witnesses, and the team of prosecutors who brought the case. The system held only insofar as efforts to bully and terrorize and bribe witnesses who have helped Donald Trump commit crimes with impunity for decades didn’t quite manage to silence all of those witnesses.
And, depressingly, the system only “held” insofar as it doesn’t collapse upon appeal, say if a someday–Supreme Court, summoned by Speaker Mike Johnson, decides, for no reason law would ever permit or condone, to step in and somehow scupper the whole conviction while giving Trump free rein to act with impunity.
We live in scary times. Anyone who isn’t voting for President Biden is voting for the 2025 Plan and a U.S. dictatorship.
But, as Biden said about gun laws, we can’t give up hope. It’s not over yet, and I do believe Biden can and will win. Then we will have to deal with whatever comes when Trump and his MAGA goons refuse to accept the outcome of another election.
Take care, and hang in there Sky Dancers.
Lazy Caturday Reads: Trump is Back on the Campaign Trail, and it’s Frightening
Posted: June 8, 2024 Filed under: cat art, Cats, caturday, Donald Trump | Tags: Autocracy, Monuments to famous cats, Trump campaign's unconstitutional plans, Trump fantasies of violence, Trump's narcissism and selfishness 6 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
This monument is located in Kyiv, Ukraine. The statue depicts a cat named Panteleimon, who was famous for his habit of sitting near a pharmacy in the city during the 19th century.
During his trial in Manhattan, Trump repeatedly claimed that he was being prevented from campaigning, even though he chose not to do so during his off days. Then, after his conviction, he spent a week golfing. But he has returned to the campaign trail now, and we’re learning more about his violent fantasies, his extreme narcissism and selfishness, and, worst of all, his authoritarian ambitions.
He gave two revealing interviews to Sean Hannity and Dr. Phil McGraw. Some reactions:
Donald Trump Friday was accused of making a threat against U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in a Fox News interview.
In the interview with Trump, the conservative network asks the former president what he thinks of Garland. Garland was first chosen by then-President Barack Obama to be a Supreme Court justice, but was made A.G. by President Joe Biden after Republicans tanked his judicial nomination during the election.
“What do you say about Merrick Garland?” the host asked.
“I’m disappointed in him,” Trump said, adding that Garland is known as being “very liberal.”
“But I always looked upon him as being a very legitimate person,” Trump then added. “And I’m very disappointed that he’s allowed this all to happen. A raid of Mar-a-Lago. They could have had whatever they wanted!”
Responding to that clip, former prosecutor Ron Filipkowski said, “Make no mistake, this is a threat.”
Dem strategist Adam Parkhomenko echoed those comments.
“Trump pretends he would’ve supported Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court while, as [Filipkowski] points out, making a threat,” he wrote on Friday.
It’s not explicit, but Trump knows he doesn’t have to do much to get his rabid followers to start harassing people he designates as enemies.
Mediaite: Trump Says ‘Sometimes Revenge Can Be Justified’ During Interview With Dr. Phil: ‘I Have to be Honest.’
Former President Donald Trump told Dr. Phil McGraw on Thursday that “sometimes revenge can be justified” after the television host suggested Trump wouldn’t “have time to get even” with his enemies in a second term in the White House.
“I think you have so much to do, you don’t have time to get even. You only have time to get right,” said McGraw during an interview with Trump on Dr. Phil Primetime.
“Well revenge does take time, I will say that,” replied Trump. “And sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil. I have to be honest. Sometimes it can.”
Phil questioned, “But is the country better or worse for going after you?”
“I think the country is really worse for what they’ve done and I think you see that when you look at the poll numbers,” said Trump. “When you see that almost $400 million has poured in since this horrible decision [in the New York hush money trial] was made, that was a few days ago. Numbers that nobody’s ever heard of in politics before. It’s a great honor.”
After Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business documents, the former president suggested on Fox News’ Hannity this week that he could get revenge on President Joe Biden if he wins a second term in November.
“Look, when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them, and it’s easy because it’s Joe Biden,” he said.
Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump’s Bizarre Moments With Dr. Phil and Hannity Should Alarm Us All.
During just this week, two of Donald Trump’s friendliest interviewers handed him big prime-time opportunities to unequivocally renounce any intention to retaliate against Democrats for his criminal conviction by a jury of his peers in Manhattan. Both times, Trump demurred.
“Sometimes revenge can be justified,” Trump told Dr. Phil McGraw, after he suggested that seeking retribution for Trump’s criminal charges would harm the country. Though Trump graciously said he was “open” to showing forbearance toward Democrats, he suggested revenge would be tempting, given “what I’ve been through.”
Miss Chippy, tribute to the feline companion of Sir Ernest Shackleton, a renowned Antarctic explorer.
Trump voiced similar sentiments to Sean Hannity after the Fox News host practically begged him to deny he’d pursue his opponents. “I would have every right to go after them,” Trump said. Though Trump nodded along with Hannity’s suggestion that “weaponizing” law enforcement is bad, Trump added, “I don’t want to look naïve,” seemingly meaning that if he doesn’t seek revenge, he’ll have been victimized without acting to set things right.
These moments have been widely mocked as a sign that even Trump’s media pals can’t help him disguise his true second-term intentions. That’s true, but there’s another point to be made here: The exchanges should awaken us to what a monstrous scam it is when Trump and his allies talk about unleashing prosecutions of foes as “revenge” and “retribution.”
We have to stop letting Trump get away with this. It’s actually spin, and we should all say so….
In the media, this story tends to be framed as follows: Will Trump seek “revenge” for his legal travails, or won’t he? But that framing unwittingly lets Trump set the terms of this debate. It implies that he is vowing to do to Democrats what was done to him.
But that’s not what Trump is actually threatening. Whereas Trump is being prosecuted on the basis of evidence that law enforcement gathered before asking grand juries to indict him, he is expressly declaring that he will prosecute President Biden and Democrats solely because this is what he endured, meaning explicitly that evidence will not be the initiating impulse.
You might think this distinction is obvious—one most voters will grasp instinctually. But why would they grasp this? It’s not uncommon to encounter news stories about Trump’s threats—see here, here, or here—that don’t explain those basic contours of the situation. Such stories often don’t take the elementary step of explaining the fundamental difference between bringing prosecutions in keeping with what evidence and the rule of law dictate and bringing them as purported “retaliation.” Why would casual readers simply infer that prosecutions against Trump are legally predicated while those he is threatening are not?
Read the rest at TNR.
Hugh Lowell at The Guardian on Trump’s violent fantasies: Trump to escalate blame on trial judge Juan Merchan if sentenced to prison.
Donald Trump is determined to avoid jail, but if he does get handed a prison sentence after his conviction on 34 felony counts in New York last week, the former president’s inner circle is certain he will lay the blame squarely at the judge’s feet, sources familiar with the matter said.
The precise way Trump might blame the judge, Juan Merchan, remains unclear because Trump has been avoidant of the issue and the matter was not resolved when he huddled with his top advisers at a Trump Tower meeting immediately after the verdict on Thursday, the sources said.
But Trump is likely to double down on his attacks against Merchan, directing his supporters at rallies and in Truth Social posts to take up their grievances with the judge, one of the sources added.
The consequences of Trump’s likely rhetoric are difficult to predict. Trump has been railing against Merchan for months as being unfair and in conspiracy cahoots with the Biden administration to prevent him from campaigning – and nothing concrete has happened.
Still, Trump’s supporters have a history of making threats against judges Trump has assailed, including death threats to Tanya Chutkan, the US district judge who is presiding in his federal 2020 election interference case, and to the chambers of the New York judge who oversaw his civil fraud trial.
Trump believes – correctly – that the ultimate decision with sentencing rests with Merchan, who has wide discretion to sentence him to fines or probation on the low end, to a carceral sentence on the high end, regardless of what prosecutors might request.
That reasoning would be the basis for Trump to hold the judge responsible for any fallout, in the event he hands down a jail term days before the Republican national convention – even if the sentence would almost certainly be stayed pending appeal.
Trump has already spent weeks railing against Merchan, taking advantage of the fact that the judge himself is not protected by the gag order. Both before and during the trial, Trump slammed the judge’s rulings as unfair and biased, and falsely suggested he was trying to stop him campaigning.
Read more at The Guardian.
As for his obvious narcissism and selfishness, look what happened at a rally in Arizona, and what could happen again tomorrow at his afternoon rally in Las Vegas.
BBC News: Extreme heat sends 11 to hospital at Arizona Trump rally.
Extreme heat in Arizona sent 11 people to hospital as thousands waited to enter a campaign rally with former President Donald Trump.
As Trump took the stage just after 17:00 EDT (22:00 GMT) at a mega-church in Phoenix, the temperature was 111F (44C).
Hamish McHamish was a beloved ginger cat that became a local celebrity in the town of St. Andrews, Scotland.
It was his first rally since his criminal conviction in a New York hush-money case, which found him guilty of falsifying business records in relation to a payment to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.
Trump used the campaign event to repeat accusations that the case against him was politically motivated and called for the conviction to be overturned.
“I just went through a rigged trial in New York,” he insisted. “It was made-up, fabricated stuff.” [….]
Fans started lining up early outside the massive Phoenix Dream City Church to see him speak, and strict security measures meant it took time for everyone to get in.
As supporters waited outside the campaign rally, BBC News saw several people being treated for heat-related issues and two were taken to hospital.
On Thursday – two weeks before summer even officially starts – the National Weather Service (NWS) forecast record-breaking temperatures in interior California, and parts of Nevada and Arizona.
Temperatures were expected to reach 121F (49C) in California’s scorching Death Valley during the heatwave.
In Phoenix, an excessive heat warning is in place on Friday, with people being asked to limit time outdoors and stay hydrated.
Why would the campaign schedule a rally in the afternoon in Phoenix? Because Trump had date with big donors at a fundraiser on Thursday night in San Francisco.
Talia Jane at The New Republic: Team Trump Brags About Letting Supporters Pass Out From Heat Stroke.
Team Trump boasted about people “braving” extreme heat in Arizona while waiting to watch Trump ramble incoherently at a campaign rally for over an hour on Thursday, making no mention that at least 11 people collapsed and were hospitalized for heat exhaustion.
“That’s an enthusiasm that Joe Biden will never see,” Trump’s newsletter proclaimed of the crowds stuck roasting on unshaded concrete. “That’s the enthusiasm Americans have to Make America Great Again!”
The intense loyalty to Trump from his supporters—largely elderly and more prone to heat stroke—is a disturbing example of how far his extremist base is willing to suffer just for a glimpse of their dear leader. Their queasy dedication speaks to the religious fervor cultivated by Trump who touts himself as a messiah who has come to save the masses from the satanic swamp, a Jesus preaching gobbledygook from the mountaintop of Dream City megachurch in Phoenix. On Friday, Trump boasted about a song that refers to him as “the chosen one”—words he has explicitly said in the past.
That Team Trump apparently took no measures to meet its base’s most basic human needs amid an anticipated high of 108 degrees on Thursday—neither handing out water nor setting up cooling tents in anticipation of the heat—and instead touted their suffering as “enthusiasm” speaks to the level of appreciation Trump has for those who support him, which is to say obviously none.
Michael Gold at The New York Times: As Trump Rallies in the Southwest, Extreme Heat Threatens MAGA Faithful.
This week, with former President Donald J. Trump holding campaign events in the Southwest, his team is grappling with an extreme heat wave that has threatened the health of some of his most ardent fans.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump went to Phoenix for a campaign event at a megachurch, where hopeful attendees waited for hours to enter as the temperature climbed above 110 degrees. The heat was so scorching that some of those waiting collapsed, and 11 people were taken to hospitals to be treated for heat exhaustion.
Tombili the Cat was a beloved street cat from Istanbul, known for his relaxed and laid-back posture while sitting on a step.
The Trump campaign is taking steps to avoid similar circumstances on Sunday, when Mr. Trump is scheduled to speak at an outdoor rally at noon at a park in Las Vegas. Forecasts expect the temperature to be around 105 degrees.
Much of the western United States has been contending with a heat wave all week. Both Phoenix and Las Vegas have been under an excessive heat warning for days, with afternoon temperatures hovering in the triple digits.
And the temperatures have been historic: Phoenix peaked at 113 degrees on Thursday, and Las Vegas at 111, both daily records for those cities….
The Weather Service’s excessive heat warning in Las Vegas is set to expire at 9 p.m. on Saturday, the night before Mr. Trump’s rally. But temperatures are currently expected to hit a high of 104 on Sunday with little cloud cover.
Supporters eager to attend a Trump event will generally arrive hours before the candidate does, standing in long, slow-moving lines to get through security screenings and secure a good vantage point. The wait can be trying in normal circumstances.
This time the campaign says they will have bottled water available along with tents to provide some relief from the sun. It still seems inhumane to schedule and event like this in the afternoon in a hot climate.
This is what MAGA expert Ron Filipkowski posted on Twitter:
Why is Trump holding his rally in the middle of the afternoon outside in Las Vegas tomorrow after dozens of people went to the hospital a few days ago at his AZ rally from the heat? And AZ was inside – those people went down in line just waiting to get through the magnetometers.
On the threat of autocracy if Trump is elected again:
The Washington Post: Trump plans to claim sweeping powers to cancel federal spending.
Donald Trump is vowing to wrest key spending powers from Congress if elected this November, promising to assert more control over the federal budget than any president in U.S. history.
The Constitution gives control over spending to Congress, but Trump and his aides maintain that the president should have much more discretion — including the authority to cease programs altogether, even if lawmakers fund them. Depending on the response from the Supreme Court and Congress, Trump’s plans could upend the balance of power between the three branches of the federal government.
The Constitution gives control over spending to Congress, but Trump and his aides maintain that the president should have much more discretion — including the authority to cease programs altogether, even if lawmakers fund them. Depending on the response from the Supreme Court and Congress, Trump’s plans could upend the balance of power between the three branches of the federal government.
During his first term, Trump was impeached after refusing to spend money for Ukraine approved by Congress, as he pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to provide incriminating evidence about the Biden family. At the time, Trump’s aides defended his actions as legal but largely did not dispute that the president is bound to adhere to budgetary law.
Since then, however, Trump and his advisers have prepared an attack on the limits on presidential spending authority. On his campaign website, Trump has said he will push Congress to repeal parts of the 1974 law that restricts the president’s authority to spend federal dollars without congressional approval. Trump has also said he will unilaterally challenge that law by cutting off funding for certain programs, promising on his first day in office to order every agency to identify “large chunks” of their budgets that would be halted by presidential edict.
“I will use the president’s long-recognized Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings,” Trump said in a plan posted last year. “This will be in the form of tax reductions for you. This will help quickly to stop inflation and slash the deficit.”
That pledge could provoke a dramatic constitutional showdown, with vast consequences for how the government operates. If he returns to office, these efforts are likely to turn typically arcane debates over “impoundment” authority — or the president’s right to stop certain spending programs — into a major political flash point, as he seeks to accomplish via edict what he cannot pass through Congress.
More details at the WaPo link.
Also from The Washington Post, by Beth Reinhard: Trump loyalist pushes ‘post-constitutional’ vision for second term.
A battle-tested D.C. bureaucrat and self-described Christian nationalist is drawing up detailed plans for a sweeping expansion of presidential power in a second Trump administration. Russ Vought, who served as the former president’s budget chief, calls his political strategy for razing long-standing guardrails “radical constitutionalism.”
Again, read more at the WaPo.
Finally, at The New York Times, Charlie Savage, Jonathan Swan, and Maggie Haberman have an article that summarizes the campaign’s plans for the country: “If Trump Wins.”
It’s a pretty bare-bones summary in the following catgories:
Crack down on illegal immigration to an extreme degree.
Use the Justice Department to prosecute his adversaries
Increase presidential power
Aggressively expand his first-term efforts to upend America’s trade policies
Retreat from military engagement with Europe
Use military force in Mexico and on American soil
That’s it for me today. Trump is back campaigning, and the press is focusing on him.
Thursday Reads
Posted: June 6, 2024 Filed under: Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, SCOTUS | Tags: Alito law clerk Susan Sullivan, Clarence Thomas, D-Day 80th anniversary, Dick Durbin, Hunter Biden trial, Judge Aileen Cannon, Justice Samuel Alito, Normandy, right to contraception, Senate vote on birth control, Todd Blanche, Trump courthouse lunches 3 CommentsGood Morning!!
“The eyes of the world are upon you,” Eisenhower speaking to troops before Normandy invasion.
Today is the 80th anniversary of D-Day, and President Biden is in France to mark the occasion. Some reports:
President Biden and key U.S. allies were in Normandy Thursday to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the U.S.-led allied forces’ D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied France. The brazen air and sea invasion would mark the beginning of the end of World War II, leading to the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi German forces in Europe less than a year later.
Mr. Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were together to mark the most significant victory of the Western allies in the war, as well as the largest seaborne invasion in history. Mr. Biden is in France through the weekend for D-Day anniversary commemorations and plans to meet with leaders of key allies during his visit.
“Seventy-three-thousand brave Americans landed at Utah and Omaha beaches in Normandy on June 6, 1944 and the president will greet American veterans and their family members while in France to honor their sacrifice,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in announcing the president’s trip.
Mr. Biden and first lady Jill Biden met WWII veterans one by one ahead of a memorial ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery on Thursday, presenting each one with coins made to commemorate the D-Day anniversary. He chatted and joked with some of the men, asking about their hometowns, thanking them for their service and calling them the greatest generation ever.
The president delivered remarks later Thursday at a commemoration ceremony that was also attended by members of Congress from both parties, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi.
The Independent: D-Day – latest: Biden warns world ‘will not surrender to bullies’ as he commemorates 80th anniversary.
President Joe Biden has vowed to not “surrender to the bullies” as he praised D-Day veterans for their bravery at a commemorative event.
The US President addressed the crowd in Ver-sur-Mer, France, on the 80th anniversary of the landings as he promised the 50 countries standing with Ukraine “will not walk away”.
“Make no mistake the autocrats of the world are watching closely to see what happens in Ukraine. To see if we let this illegal aggression go unchecked,” he said.
“To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators is simply unthinkable.”
He added: “History tells us freedom is not free. You want to know the price of freedom come here to Normandy to look.”
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden greet a World War II veteran during ceremonies to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy. AP
Yahoo News: D-Day latest: Biden brands Putin ‘tyrant and bully’ in Normandy speech.
US President Joe Biden referred to Vladimir Putin as a ‘tyrant’ and a ‘bully’ in his D-Day commemoration speech, after hailing the ‘resolute’ Second World War troops who fought in Normandy 80 years ago today.
President Biden was among the speakers at an international gathering in northern France to commemorate the June 1944 conflict. Biden recognised the bravery of troops who stormed the beaches in Normandy, before going on to speak about the Ukraine war and how ‘the struggle between dictatorship and freedom is unending’.
Earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron had given France’s highest award, the Legion d’Honneur, to a number of US veterans, while the Danish prime minister said it is our generation’s “responsibility” to stand up to Vladimir Putin.
The New York Times’ Roger Cohen has a special report on D-Day with photos by Laetitia Vancon: D-Day at 80: Veterans of the pivotal battle of World War II are disappearing. Europe, facing new conflict, recalls what their comrades died for.
They were ordinary. The young men from afar who clambered ashore on June 6, 1944, into a hail of Nazi gunfire from the Normandy bluffs did not think of themselves as heroes.
No, said Gen. Darryl A. Williams, the commanding general of United States Army Europe and Africa, the allied soldiers “in this great battle were ordinary,” youths who “rose to this challenge with courage and a tremendous will to win, for freedom.”
In front of the general, during a ceremony this week at Deauville on the Normandy coast, were 48 American survivors of that day, the youngest of them 98, most of them 100 years old or more. The veterans sat in wheelchairs. They saluted, briskly enough. Eight decades have gone by, many of them passed in silence because memories of the war were too terrible to relate.
When the 90th anniversary of D-Day comes around in 2034, there may be no more vets. Living memory of the beaches of their sacrifice will be no more.
“Dark clouds of war in Europe are forming,” General Williams said, as he alluded to allied determination to defend Ukraine against Russian attack. This 80th anniversary of the landings is a celebration, but a somber one. Europe is troubled and apprehensive, extremism eating at its liberal democracies.
For more than 27 months now, there has been a war on the continent that has taken hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian and Russian lives. Russia was not invited to the commemoration even though the role of the Soviet Red Army in the defeat of Hitler was critical. A decade ago, President Vladimir V. Putin attended. Now he speaks of nuclear war. It is a time of fissuring and uncertainty.
Remembering the fight against Hitler in WWII is so important today, when a criminal and conman has apparently hypnotizes a large portion of the U.S. population. We can’t allow him to end our democracy and turn Europe over to Putin.
Back in the USA, Senate Republicans showed their true colors yesterday in a vote to protect the right to contraception.
CNN: Senate GOP blocks bill to guarantee access to contraception.
Senate Republicans voted Wednesday to block a bill put forward by Democrats that would guarantee access to contraception nationwide, as Democrats seek to highlight the issue in the run up to November’s elections.
The bill – the Right to Contraception Act – would enshrine into federal law a right for individuals to buy and use contraceptives, as well as for health care providers to provide them. It would apply to birth control pills, the plan B pill, condoms and other forms of contraception.
The legislation failed to advance in a procedural vote by a tally of 51 to 39. Most Republicans dismissed the effort as a political messaging vote that is unnecessary and overly broad.
GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins crossed over to vote with Democrats in favor of advancing the bill. Schumer switched his vote to a no at the last minute in a procedural move that will allow Democrats to bring the bill back up in the future if they want.
“This is a show vote. It’s not serious,” GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said. “Plus, it’s a huge overreach. It doesn’t make any exceptions for conscience. … It’s a phony vote because contraception, to my knowledge, is not illegal. It’s not unavailable.”
The vote is part of a larger push by Senate Democrats to draw attention to how the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has affected all aspects of reproductive health – not just abortion – as the election draws closer. Democrats are highlighting the issue this month, which marks the two-year anniversary of the high court’s ruling.
“In the coming weeks, Senate Democrats will put reproductive freedoms front and center before this chamber, so that the American people can see for themselves who will stand up to defend their fundamental liberties,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said ahead of the vote.
Democratic senators have also introduced a legislative package to establish a nationwide right to in-vitro fertilization, which is expected to come up for a vote as soon as next week.
The Daily Beast: Biden Campaign Names and Shames Republicans Who Voted to Block Contraception Bill.
The Biden campaign posted a video on Wednesday night showing the faces of the 39 senators who voted against the legislation. (Seven Republican senators were not present for the vote.)
“These are the Trump-aligned Republicans who just blocked a bill to protect a woman’s right to contraception,” the campaign tweeted on X….
Ahead of the vote, Schumer said that Senate Democrats would “put reproductive freedoms front and center before this chamber, so that the American people can see for themselves who will stand up to defend their fundamental liberties,” according to the Associated Press.
Polling has consistently shown that there is broad bipartisan support among American voters for contraception, with 92 percent of respondents telling Gallup in 2022 that birth control was “morally acceptable.”
Republicans argued that legislation to enshrine the right to contraception is unnecessary, as it remains freely accessible and available across the country….
But Schumer said in a post-vote speech that “we are kidding ourselves if we think the hard-right is satisfied with overturning Roe,” warning that birth control could be next as reproductive rights continue to be threatened.
“So, make one thing clear: today was not a ‘show vote’ – this was a show-us-who-you-are vote,” he said. “And Senate Republicans showed the American people exactly who they are.”
Recall that after the Dobbs decision, Clarence Thomas stated his desire to overturn the decisions that made contraception, same sex marriage, and sex between same sex partners basic rights–all based on the right to privacy.
Speaking of the right wing SCOTUS justices, last night a former clerk of Samuel Alito appeared on Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC show.
HuffPost: Former Alito Law Clerk ‘Aghast’ After Seeing Jan. 6 Flag Outside His Home, Calls For Recusal.
A former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said Wednesday she was shocked after learning two flags affiliated with rioters during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection were flown outside his homes, saying she believed he should recuse himself from several cases before the court.
Susan Sullivan, who worked as a clerk while Alito was a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, spoke to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell amid the controversy surrounding the flags.
“I was aghast when I saw those photographs because I’ve never known Justice Alito to be anything other than an honorable man, to be a man of integrity,” Sullivan, now a professor at Temple University, told O’Donnell. “It is irrelevant if Mrs. Alito flew it or not. The fact is that flag was there.”
“This is not an insignificant symbol,” she went on. “Irrespective of why it is there, who put it there, it shouldn’t have been there. The problem is that flag is incendiary and it cannot do anything other than raise a reasonable inference of bias.”
Alito has rejected the calls for him to recuse from January 6 related cases.
“I am confident that a reasonable person who is not motivated by political or ideological considerations or a desire to affect the outcome of Supreme Court cases would conclude that the events … do not meet the applicable standard for recusal,” he wrote in a letter to lawmakers last month. “I am therefore required to reject your request.”
Sullivan rejected that claim in the Wednesday interview and an earlier opinion piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer, saying recusal was warranted especially because of the decision before the court.
“[It is] the symbol of these people who attacked the capitol. They support Trump unconditionally,” she said. “So if you have cases before the court that directly relates not just to the former president but to criminal cases that involve that election process…”
“The stakes have never been higher and recusal is, to me, it just defies logic that one would not recuse themselves from a case like this,” Sullivan added. “The stakes are too high.”
Why isn’t Senator Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee doing anything to rein in Alito?
Noah Berlansky at Public Notice: Dick Durbin needs to step up and do his damn job.
The Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday held a lengthy oversight hearing to badger Attorney General Merrick Garland and push the GOP’s false narrative about President Biden weaponizing the DOJ against Donald Trump.
Even though the hearing was conducted in obvious bad faith, it was in some ways successful, at least in the limited sense that Republicans grabbed a lot of headlines and forced Garland to spend a day on the defensive. Virtually every major news outlet it extensive coverage, ranging from the New York Times to MSNBC to Newsmax….
Congressional oversight hearings give Congress a chance to focus the national conversation on what members want to talk about. It gives them a chance to pressure executive branch officials to adopt congressional priorities, or to explain and potentially embarrass themselves.
In contrast, Democrats in the Senate have been bizarrely reluctant to use hearings to advance their agenda. Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has refused to hold hearings to investigate egregious evidence of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas receiving gifts from far right billionaires, or to demand answers from Alito about his apparent embrace of the insurrection. Instead, he’s posting weak statements on social media meekly calling for right-wing members of the Court to do a better job policing themselves.
Republicans like Jim Jordan are ignorant about a lot of things. But they understand that the gavel is power, and they are not afraid to use it. Senate Democrats need to get over their qualms and, in this instance, behave more like their rivals across the aisle….
Hearings drive narratives. But they can do more than that. Congress has real power to pressure government officials, and hearings are a way to demonstrate and exercise that power.
Read more at Public Notice.
More odds and ends:
The Daily Beast: Hunter Biden Prosecutors Might’ve Already Lost the Jury.
The Hunter Biden trial starting in Wilmington, Delaware, is a poster-child case for potential jury nullification.
Biden, the only surviving son of President Joe Biden, is being tried for possessing a firearm while being a user of illegal drugs or drug addict and for lying about the same on a purchase form when he bought a gun. On the surface, the prosecution—a culmination of more than a half-decade of investigation by Special Counsel David Weiss—would appear to have a slam dunk case because there is no real dispute he bought the gun, or that he had a drug addiction around the time he bought the gun.
The strict definition of jury nullification is when a jury has determined that a defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt—but either rejects the evidence or refuses to apply the law because the jury “wants to send a message about some social issue that is larger than the case itself, or because the result dictated by law is contrary to the jury’s sense of justice, morality, or fairness.”
Mr. and Mrs. Hunter Biden
Let’s be clear. Juries are not supposed to do that. They are supposed to convict if the evidence proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and acquit if it doesn’t.
But while the definition of nullification conjures up images of a jury making a social justice-inspired speech in refusing to convict, the reality is quite different because the jury does not need to make such a blatant statement. Rather, the sense that jurors may have of unfairness can be evidenced in an acquittal—despite strong evidence of guilt. (There’s also, of course, the possibility of a hung jury.)
What that means is skilled defense counsel can bring out the factors of unfairness without having to specifically ask a jury to ignore evidence or the law, while skilled prosecutors need to guard against the kind of evidence and testimony that may lead to nullification.
Thus far, the trial is revealing an outmatched prosecution, which has already blundered into a couple of minefields. Defense counsel Abbe Lowell is a seasoned high-profile defense counsel who has defended Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner and got former presidential candidate John Edwards acquitted on campaign finance charges (brought by then-DOJ lawyer Jack Smith).
In the opening by the Biden defense team, Lowell focused on the requirement that the false statements on the gun ownership form had to be “knowing”—a term that Lowell claimed the prosecution tried to avoid in its opening. The utility of this defense is that it works synergistically with the effects of Biden’s admitted drug addiction affecting his decision-making abilities, as well as necessitating a deep dive into the details of his addiction and the specific timeline of when he was using crack cocaine and his efforts to get clean.
The defense appears to be setting up a defense theory that, on the specific date Biden bought the gun, he genuinely believed he was not an addict because he had just finished an 11-day rehabilitation program.
More at the link.
Alan Feuer at The New York Times: Judge Reshuffles Hearings in Trump Documents Case.
The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case abruptly changed the proceeding’s schedule on Wednesday, reshuffling the timing for hearings on an array of important legal issues.
The move by the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, was unlikely to have much impact on the overall trajectory of the case, but it reflected the substantial number of unresolved legal motions she is juggling. Last month, Judge Cannon scrapped the case’s trial date, saying she could not yet pick a new one because of what she described at the time as “the myriad and interconnected” questions she had still not managed to consider.
Judge Cannon kept in place a hearing she had set for June 21 to discuss a motion by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that Jack Smith, the special counsel named to oversee the prosecutions of Mr. Trump, was illegally appointed to his job.
Similar motions have been rejected in cases involving other special counsels, including Robert S. Mueller III, who investigated connections between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, and David C. Weiss, who has brought two criminal cases against Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son.
The most important change Judge Cannon made to the schedule in a brief order was arguably the cancellation of a three-day hearing that had been set to take place starting June 24 in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla.
The hearing was originally meant to consider whether Mr. Trump’s lawyers should be permitted access to communications between prosecutors working for Mr. Smith and officials at the National Archives and several national security agencies.
Giddy up
The lawyers want those communications to bolster their claims that Mr. Smith worked hand in glove with the Biden administration and members of the so-called deep state to bring the documents case against Mr. Trump.
Prosecutors had objected to holding the proceeding at all, telling Judge Cannon in March that no similar hearings had ever been held in the Southern District of Florida, where she sits. In her order on Wednesday, she said she would place the hearing back on her calendar at some point in the future.
Instead of that hearing, Judge Cannon said there would now be a shorter one, on June 24 and 25, to consider different topics, including any lingering discussion about Mr. Smith’s appointment.
Judge Cannon also told the defense and the prosecution to be ready to debate Mr. Trump’s motion to exclude from the case any evidence — including more than 100 classified documents — that the F.B.I. discovered in August 2022 when agents searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.
The two sides will argue as well over Mr. Trump’s attempt to suppress the private audio notes that prosecutors obtained from one of his lawyers through a process that pierced the normal protections of attorney-client privilege. The notes by the lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, were central to the government’s allegations that Mr. Trump had obstructed the government’s repeated efforts to reclaim the classified materials he took to Mar-a-Lago.
Finally, the parties are expected to discuss Mr. Smith’s request to Judge Cannon to alter Mr. Trump’s conditions of release by barring him from making public statements that could endanger F.B.I. agents working on the case.
Aileen Cannon is an expert at causing unnecessary delays without triggering an appeal to the 11th Circuit. If she rules that Jack Smith was illegally appointed, that would be cause for immediate appeal, so she will probably find some way to just waste more time.
Jose Pagliery at The Daily Beast: Trial Lawyer Lost 8 Lbs Skipping Trump’s McDonald’s Courthouse Lunches.
Donald Trump’s lead lawyer says the former president’s seven-week criminal trial in New York took a physical toll—but he still managed to lose weight by skipping Trump’s notoriously unhealthy meals.
Todd Blanche appeared on a podcast, For The Defense, hosted by the attorney David Oscar Markus.
“Was it McDonald’s for lunch every single day, or did you get something else?” Markus asked.
“Oh, no-no-no,” Blanche said. “Well, first of all, I didn’t have lunch one day. I ate in the morning and at night.”
Delivery of McDonalds order for Trump’s courthouse lunch
“Look, President Trump’s team takes care of everybody. Like, everybody gets food. You know, there’s a lot of food. It’s not always McDonald’s. There’s a lot of… variety. There’s pizza, and there’s other non-healthy alternatives to McDonald’s.”
Blanche smiled, turning away from the camera and raising his eyebrows.
“Look, I loved it, because, you know, you come in from lunch, and as you know when you’re on trial, you’re trying to figure out what the heck you’re gonna stuff in your belly with the hour that you have. And we would walk in, and there would just be this, just, plethora of just food everywhere,” he said, gesturing with his hands.
The public got a peek last Thursday, when Donald Trump Jr. posted a TikTok video from what legal teams sometimes call the “war room,” where defendants strategize during breaks. The clip showed Trump Sr. sitting before a half-finished 20-ounce Diet Coca-Cola, an opened bag of Lay’s potato chips, a box of Milk Duds, a Milky Way bar, a theater-sized box of Whoppers malted milk balls, and what appeared to be four Hostess SnoBalls….
Trump’s go-to McDonald’s meal—two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish, and a chocolate shake—was first described by close ally Corey R. Lewandowski in a 2017 book, Let Trump Be Trump.
How is it possible that Trump hasn’t had a heart attack by now?
That’s all I have for you today. I hope you’re enjoying your Thursday.
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